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Famous weather scientist: Climategate 'tip of iceberg'

'Conspiracy would become manifest' if all climate research e-mails unveiled

Bob Unruh joined WND in 2006 after nearly three decades with the Associated Press, as well as several Upper Midwest newspapers, where he covered everything from legislative battles and sports to tornadoes and homicidal survivalists. He is also a photographer whose scenic work has been used commercially.

The Colorado scientist described by the Washington Post as “the World’s Most Famous Hurricane Expert” says the “Climategate” e-mails from the United Kingdom that revealed possible data manipulation are evidence of a conspiracy among “warmists,” those who believe man’s actions are triggering possibly catastrophic climate change.

“The recent ‘ClimateGate’ revelations coming out of the UK University of East Anglia are but the tip of a giant iceberg of a well-organized international climate-warming conspiracy that has been gathering momentum for the last 25 years,” said Colorado State University’s William Gray.

His annual hurricane forecasts are the standard for weather prognostications. His work pioneered the science of forecasting hurricanes, and he has served as weather forecaster for the U.S. Air Force. He is emeritus professor of atmospheric science at CSU and heads the school’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences Tropical Meteorology Project.

Gray was referring to e-mails and other information obtained by a hacker and posted on a Russian web server that included interactions among the world’s most influential climate-change scientists.

One e-mail said: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd (sic) from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

Another expressed internal doubts: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August (Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society) 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.”

Further, an e-mail exchange suggested the suppression of information: “Can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith re (Assessment Report 4)? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.”

Gray said, “This conspiracy would become much more manifest if all the e-mails of the publicly funded climate-research groups of the U.S. and of foreign governments were ever made public.”

His comments are posted at ClimateDepot.com as world leaders are conferencing in Copenhagen to discuss taking drastic economic measures to curb “global warming.”

Gray warns that the likely agreements coming out of Copenhagen, the cap-and-trade bill before Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision announced this week to treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant “represents a grave threat to the industrial world’s continued economic development.”

“We should not allow these proposals to restrict our economic growth,” Gray said. “Any United Nations climate bill our country might sign would act as an infringement on our country’s sovereignty.”

He said he probably would have been concerned about the possibility people are causing serious global climate degradation “had I not devoted my entire career of over half-a-century to the study and forecasting of meteorological and climate events.”

“There has been an unrelenting quarter century of one-sided indoctrination of the Western world by the media and by various scientists and governments concerning a coming carbon-dioxide … induced global-warming disaster,” he said. “These warming scenarios have been orchestrated by a combination of environmentalists, vested-interest scientists wanting larger federal grants and publicity, the media which profits from doomsday-scenario reporting, governmental bureaucrats who want more power over our lives, and socialists who want to level out global living standards.

“These many alarmist groups appear to have little concern over whether their global-warming prognostications are accurate, however. And they most certainly are not. The alarmists believe they will be able to scare enough of our citizens into believing their propaganda that the public will be willing to follow their advice on future energy usage and agree to a lowering of their standard of living in the name of climate salvation.”

Gray said there still hasn’t been an “honest and broad” scientific debate on the influence of CO2 on global temperature, contending the present models presented by scientists are flawed.

He cited a global warming of about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the last century, and that’s “not a consequence of human activities.”

“The disastrous economic consequences of restricting CO2 emissions from the present by as much as 20 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050 (as being proposed in Copenhagen) have yet to be digested by the general public. Such CO2 output decreases would cause very large increases in our energy costs, a lowering of our standard of living, and do nothing of significance to improve our climate,” he said.

Gray launched the practice of seasonal hurricane forecasts. After the 2005 Atlantic season, he said he was stepping down from the primary authorship of the CSU report, turning over those duties to Philip J. Klotzbach.

He’s long described global warming as a hoax, telling the Post three years ago, “I am of the opinion that this is one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people.”

University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit

Myron Ebell of the GlobalWarming.org website, where “cooler heads prevail,” said the e-mails obtained from the University of East Anglia were “shocking.”

“It’s kind of interesting to learn that petty politics seems to be more prevalent in the scientific community than in the political community,” he said.

The documents, he said, “raise a huge number of questions about the integrity of a lot of people in the alarmist community.”

“What I’ve seen there is a very strong effort to manage the issue by scientists and not as a scientific issue. It’s very improper,” he said. “One of the criticisms is that we need scientists to be scientists, and policy can be handled in public debate.”

Phil Jones, head of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, confirmed the documents appeared authentic. He has temporarily stepped down while an investigation is taking place.

Despite the advocacy of a financially vested former vice president, Al Gore, and others, public opinion about whether mankind is causing an ultimately catastrophic rise in global temperatures is shifting.

U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, has urged members of Congress to consider the joint opinion of nearly 32,000 scientists, including more than 9,000 Ph.D.s, who believe humans likely have little or nothing to do with any “global warming.”

The Petition Project, launched some 10 years ago when the first few thousand signatures were gathered, has steadily grown without any special effort or campaign.

But in the last few years, and especially because of the release of Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” the campaign has been reinvigorated.

“Mr. Gore’s movie, asserting a ‘consensus’ and ‘settled science’ in agreement about human-caused global warming, conveyed the claims about human-caused global warming to ordinary moviegoers and to public-school children, to whom the film was widely distributed. Unfortunately, Mr. Gore’s movie contains many very serious incorrect claims which no informed, honest scientist could endorse,” project spokesman and founder Art Robinson has told WND.

“Our energy policies must be based upon scientific truth – not fictional movies or self-interested international agendas,” Paul said. “They should be based upon the accomplishments of technological free enterprise that have provided our modern civilization, including our energy industries. That free enterprise must not be hindered by bogus claims about imaginary disasters.”

The petition states: “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

Robinson has warned of serious political and economic consequences of assuming “global warming” results from mankind’s actions.

“The campaign to severely ration hydrocarbon energy technology has now been markedly expanded,” he said. “In the course of this campaign, many scientifically invalid claims about impending climate emergencies are being made. Simultaneously, proposed political actions to severely reduce hydrocarbon use now threaten the prosperity of Americans and the very existence of hundreds of millions of people in poorer countries,” he told WND.